How clean are your hands?

As part of Year 2's Science topic, we have been learning about personal hygiene. We’ve discussed all the ways we can stay clean and healthy, such as brushing our teeth, showering and washing our hands.

But, we wanted to find out how important it actually was to wash your hands.

Does washing your hands really reduce the amount of bacteria on them?

Warhol and Kusama Class decided to investigate….

We started with three slices of bread.

The first slice of bread was our control slice. We placed the bread inside a ziplock bag. We did not touch the bread with our hands.

We passed around a second piece of bread with our dirty hands and put it into a ziplock bag.

We washed our hands with soap and warm water to get rid of the bacteria and germs. (We remembered to sing Happy Birthday twice to check we had washed them for long enough).  We then passed around a piece of bread with our clean hands and put it into our ziplock bag.

We put a damp paper towel into each ziplock bag because we know that bacteria grows in warm, damp conditions.

We then wrote our predictions.

“I predict that the dirty hands one will go the mouldiest because the whole class touched the bread with dirty hands.” 

“I predict that the dirty hands bread will go mouldy in one day. The clean hands bread will go mouldy in 3 days and the control bread will go mouldy in a month because it has no bacteria on.” 

A week later, we looked closely at the bread and gathered our results. We couldn’t believe how much mould had grown on the ‘dirty hands’ slice in a week! Yuck! 

We concluded that it IS very important to wash our hands, especially before eating!